A honeybee colony is reliant upon a single queen for the reproduction of its population. The queen is the only bee with fully developed ovaries. A queen bee can live for 3-5 years. The queen mates only once with several male (drone) bees, and will remain fertile for life. She lays up to 2000 eggs per day. Fertilized eggs become female (worker bees) and unfertilized eggs become male (drone bees). When she dies or becomes unproductive, the other bees will "make" a new queen by selecting a young larva and feeding it a diet of "royal jelly."  For queen bees, it takes 16 days from egg to emergence.
The queens produce a sophisticated array of chemicals signals (pheromones) that influence both the behavior and physiology of their nest mates. Most striking are the effects of queen mandibular pheromones (QMP), a chemical blend that induces young workers to feed and groom the queen and primes bees to perform colony-related tasks. The pheromone operates at a cellular level and has profound affects on dopamine pathways, pathways that play a central role in behavioral regulation and motor control. In young bees (nurse bees) the pheromone has a greater effect as they are responsible for feeding and grooming the queen, so they stay in constant physical contact with her. The substance is identified as homovanillyl alcohol.